Listeners’ effects on autobiographical memory for recent events

ABSTRACT

The current study tested the effects of attentive versus distracted listening on both speakers and listeners in recall of an autobiographical memory. Participants included 128 pairs of friends who spoke with each other over a video call about recent negative experience that one of them had. Participants were randomly assigned to be speakers or listeners, and listeners were randomly assigned to an attentive and a distracted condition. Memory narratives were coded for factual and interpretive content. Participants returned approximately 4 weeks later, when both speaker and listener separately reported their memories of the prior conversation. Attentive listening was linked both to greater recall by the speaker at time 1 and greater listener recall at time 2, but not to speaker’s recall at time 2. Results show the effects of listener contributions to recall in the moment but raise questions as to whether they persist beyond the conversation in many scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Autobiographical memory
• listener effects
• reconsolidation
• social influence
• conversational influence on memory

Acknowledgements

The authors express gratitude to Monisha Pasupathi for sharing materials, consulting on study design, and for her thoughts as the project progressed. The authors would also like to thank research assistants Andrea Alvarez, Carolina Carneiro, Meredith Franchini, Ian Greenawalt, Katherine Lurie, Ali Raja, Hanna Riley, and Jessica Scarlett for their tireless work collecting data and coding narratives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, A. G. The data are not publicly available due to their containing information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Notes

1 Due to the exploratory nature of the analysis, data were also submitted to a factor analysis for which two factors emerged, with the strongest factor emphasizing factual elaborative questions, advice, referring to previous knowledge, and supportive encouragement, and the second factor emphasizing summarizing the narrator’s perspective, empathy, acknowledgment, and interpretive elaborative questions. The correlations reported in text were stronger for this second factor (r_facts = 0.60, r_int = 0.36, vs. r_facts = 0.44, r_int = 0.15), though not statistically significantly stronger. In addition, each of the ten coded variables was correlated with time 1 facts and interpretations, yielding broadly similar patterns (for facts, r’s range from 0.22 to 0.72, with 9 of 10 achieving statistical significance; for interpretations, r’s range from 0.09 to 0.38, with 4 of ten achieving statistical significance; for total, r’s range from 0.24 to 0.66 with 9 of 10 achieving statistical significance). With the small sample, combining into a single factor was deemed more appropriate to enable fewer correlations and fewer inferences, especially given the consistency of the results.

2 In our pre-registration, we included the following exploratory hypothesis: More time in the attentive condition means more engagement and more shared reality for the speaker and listener and we should see this lead to more consistency in what speaker and listener recall. Time of each conversation was recorded, but it correlated with total combined facts and interpretations at time 1 at r = 0.89, rendering too much collinearity to separately analyze time alongside narrative content.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Benson Funds, Internal Dickinson College Grant.